Ottoman History Podcast

E286 | During the late 19th century, Louis Pasteur and his disciples promoted a laboratory-based study of disease and contagion that led to what many call "the bacteriological turn" and reshaped public health in France and beyond. In this episode, we sit down with doctor, philosopher, and historian Anne-Marie Moulin to talk about the history of the Pastorians and the early establishment of Pasteur...

E285 | Famous images such as Amin al-Husayni's meeting with Hitler have come to dominate the public imagination of Arab-Nazi relations in Western societies. But to what extent does this imagery reflect actual trajectories of reception and reflection of fascist ideology in the Middle East or the experience that Arabs and Muslims of other origins had under Nazi rule? In this episode, we discuss the...

E284 | The history of Mediterranean islands offers a dynamic paradox of insularity engendered by geographical isolation and connectivity fostered by access to ports and maritime networks. In this podcast, we discuss those themes through a conversation about the transformation of Cyprus over the centuries of Ottoman imperial rule. Our guest Antonis Hadjicyriakou has studied the history of Cyprus fr...

E283 | The epithet "abid," Arabic for "slave," still follows those with dark skin as they move around today's Cairo. The word and its negative connotations, however, have a long history. In this episode, Professor Eve Troutt Powell explores this history by tracing the many lives of slaves and slavery in late Ottoman Egypt. She draws on the narratives of Ottoman Egyptian elites, Sudanese slave trad...

E282 | Classical encyclopedias and compendia such as Pliny’s Natural History have long been known to Western audiences, but the considerably more recent works of medieval Islamic scholars have been comparatively ignored. In this episode, we talk to Elias Muhanna about his new translation of a fourteenth-century Arabic compendium by Egyptian scholar Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, which covers everything...

E281 | In the conventional telling of the intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamicate world, there has been very little room for people outside the ranks of the learned scholars or ulema associated with the religious, intellectual, and political elite of Muslim communities. But in this episode, we explore the writings of Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, an 18th-century Damascene b...

E280 | What happens when we encounter "Orientalist" aesthetics outside the West? In the late nineteenth century, a cosmopolitan group of Ottoman architects turned to modern forms of art history writing to argue that synthesis and change stood at the heart of a particularly "Ottoman" architectural aesthetic. Working together, these writers produced the first text of modern art history writing in th...

E279 | Between December 1991 and February 2002, Algeria experienced a protracted civil war, which earned the period the designation of the "dark decade." In this episode, we explore how Algerians experienced and coped with the violence and trepidation of the civil war through the lens of humor. Our guest Elizabeth Perego has studied to role of humor, jokes, and caricatures in the politics of Alger...

E278 | The French military struggle to maintain control over Algeria throughout the war period (1954-1962) is remembered for its violent and destructive impacts. But during the war, the French administration also sought to maintain control over Algeria by attempting to build the rural economy and deepening the structures of colonial rule in the countryside. In this episode, we talk to Muriam Haleh...

E277 | The Algerian War is perhaps the most recognizable national and anti-colonial movement of the 20th century. From the iconic film “The Battle of Algiers” to Frantz Fanon's influential book The Wretched of the Earth, the violence of the Algerian fight for independence and the French reaction has marked depictions of not only the war but representations of Algerian history on the whole. In this...

E276 | Whereas military histories once focused narrowly on armies, battles, and technologies, the new approach to military history emphasizes how armies and navies were linked to issues such as political economy, gender, and environment. In this episode, we sit down with Gábor Ágoston to discuss the principal issues concerning the relationship between the Ottoman-Habsburg military frontier in Hu...

E275 | The turn of the nineteenth century was a period of tumult and transformation in the Ottoman Empire, as in many places around the world from France to Haiti, China, and the United States. With people, ideas, and armies on the move as never before, new geopolitical pressures pushed states around the globe to reinvent their relationships to their subjects and citizens. In this episode, we talk...

E274 | How does the structure of bureaucracies and state administrations influence the capacity for political and social change, and what are the legacies of empire for contemporary societies? In this episode, we take a comparative look at these questions by focusing on former regions of the British Empire that have been subject to different forms of political partition. Our guest Yael Berda is a...

E273 | The Palestinian Arabs who remained within the borders of Israel after the 1948 war became citizens of the new state. But in those early years Arab villages lived under military rule that would last nearly two decades. In this episode, Shira Robinson discusses the research for her book Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State, which examines the crucial...

E272 | The 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council, passed by the British government and implemented in the Palestine Mandate, was the first piece of mandate legislation to officially recognize Palestine's Arab community as citizens of Palestine rather than 'ex-enemy Ottoman subjects.' This marked a change in the legal position of Palestine's Arab residents, and a confirmation of the de facto...

E271 | L’histoire de l’Algérie coloniale est souvent abordée du point de vue des bouleversements économiques et politiques engendrés par l’occupation française. Mais cette dernière entraîna un remaniement dans la sphère de l’intime qui fut tout aussi significatif, bien que peu étudié. Dans cet épisode, Aurélie Perrier se penche sur la question de l’évolution des formes de sexualités illicites en A...

E270 | Genomic research is resolving old questions about the history of plague, revealing, for example, that the Black Death was caused by the same species of plague that exists today and demonstrating the complex ways in which plague moved throughout the medieval and early modern world. Yet even as scientific methods today shed light on the history of plague, past understandings and depictions of...

E269 | In many countries of the Middle East and North Africa, European colonial rule lasted only for a matter of decades, and yet its influence in the realms of politics and economy have been profound. In this episode, we talk to Jonathan Wyrtzen about the legacy of colonialism in Morocco for the politics of identity, which is the subject of his new book entitled Making Morocco. As Dr. Wyrzten exp...

E268 | While the millet system has been used as a means of studying the special case of religious pluralism in the Ottoman Empire, many have pointed to the limitations of this framework in which religious communities appears as segmented units separate by firm boundaries. In this interview with Nathalie Clayer, we discuss new ways of thinking about religious pluralism in the Ottoman Empire through...

E267 | During the 1920s, a publisher in Lahore published a satire on the domestic life of the Prophet Muhammad during a period of religious polemics and communal tension between Muslims and Hindus under British rule. The inflammatory text soon became a legal matter, first when the publisher was brought to trial and acquitted for "attempts to promote feelings of enmity or hatred between different c...

E266 | The changing of one's religion may be viewed today as a matter of personal spirituality or identity, but as the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere increasingly shows, conversion was often a public act with political, socioeconomic, and gendered components. In this episode, Elyse Semerdjian returns to the podcast to discuss her research on conversion in early modern Aleppo an...

E265 | The Capitulations are regarded as one of the most obvious and humiliating signs of European dominance over Ottoman markets and diplomatic relations in the 19th century, granting European merchants and their Ottoman protégés extensive extraterritorial privileges within the empire. In this podcast, Professor Omar Cheta probes the limits of the Capitulations in the Ottoman province of Egypt, w...

E264 | The period from the 1870s to 1914 was the peak of the nineteenth-century globalisation characterised by increased movement of capital across the world. In this podcast, Coşkun discusses his recent book on ‘Sovereign Debt and the International Financial Control: the Middle East and the Balkans, 1870-1914’, the role of banks as intermediaries between the Ottoman government and international f...

E263 | Ottoman History Podcast'in bu bölümünde, Nurçin İleri ile geç dönem Osmanlı İstanbul’unda gece, korku ve suç ilişkisi üzerine konuştuk. Farklı toplumsal tabakalardan insanların, demografik ve fiziksel anlamda hızla dönüşen kent mekanınını sokakların aydınlatılması çalışmaları, geceleri mobilite, kamusal eğlence ve aktivitelerin kontrolü ekseninde nasıl deneyimledikleri ve ne hissettiklerini...

E262 | The illustrated account of the festivals surrounding the circumcision of Sultan Ahmed III's sons in 1720 is one of the most iconic and celebrated depictions of urban life in Ottoman Istanbul. With its detailed text written by Vehbi, accompanied by the vibrant miniature paintings of Levni, this work has been used as a source for understanding the cast of professions and personalities that oc...